Jules.FMMailScanner and me

They may be free of DRM, but they certainly are not free of information identifying exactly who bought them from iTunes and when! If you buy DRM-free, or “iTunes Plus” songs from the iTunes Store, and then share them with anyone else, you can still easily see exactly who originally bought them and therefore whether any copyright theft has taken place.

Fortunately, with a bit of hackery, it’s very simple to remove all the identifying information from iTunes Plus tracks.

Firstly, you need to download and install the developer tools “XCode” from Apple. The bits you really need are the command-line compilers. Unfortunately you have to register as a developer with Apple, but that only takes a few moments. Or you might have a friend who is already registered. Beware, XCode is a pretty big download!

Once all that is installed, log out of your Mac and log back in again to be safe, then open up a Terminal (in Applications / Utilities), and run this command: sudo cpan install Audio::M4P::QuickTimeYou will have to type in your password, after which it will start doing all sorts of magic stuff to install this little bit. Just say “y” to all the prompts. Don’t worry, it won’t do any harm

Then download anontree.zip, put it on your Desktop and double-click on it to unpack it (if your web browser hasn’t already done so!). You will get a file “anontree.pl”, put that on your Desktop.

Now go to the Terminal window (open a new one if you closed it), and run these two commands: cd ~/Music/iTunes perl ~/Desktop/anontree.pl 'iTunes Music'and don’t forget those single quotes (apostrophes) in that second command, or it won’t work.It should now sit and process all the *.m4a files in your iTunes Music Library, removing all identifying marks from them. They will still work just fine in iTunes, nothing will break. This can take a few minutes to run, but it will keep showing you what it’s doing.

That’s it! That wasn’t so hard now, was it. And now you can even tell your friends you’re a Perl hacker.